LANZA Atelier to design the Serpentine Pavilion 2026 in London
Mexico City–based practice LANZA Atelier, founded by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, has been selected to create the Serpentine Pavilion 2026, with a project that reimagines the historic crinkle-crankle wall through brick, light, and permeability.
Each summer in London, a small corner of Kensington Gardens becomes the site of one of architecture’s most closely watched experiments. The Serpentine Pavilion is never meant to last, yet year after year it shapes conversations far beyond its temporary footprint, offering designers and visitors alike a space to gather, reflect, and experience architecture at its most immediate.
For its 25th edition, Serpentine Galleries has announced that the Serpentine Pavilion 2026 will be designed by LANZA Atelier, the Mexico City–based practice founded in 2015 by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo. Opening to the public on 6 June 2026 and remaining in place until 25 October 2026, the new structure will stand beside Serpentine South, continuing the programme’s legacy as one of the world’s most influential design commissions.
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Titled a serpentine, the project arrives at a particularly symbolic moment. Not only does it mark the Pavilion’s anniversary year, but it also coincides with a special partnership with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, honouring the architect who inaugurated the very first Pavilion in 2000 and set the tone for decades of architectural experimentation to follow.
LANZA Atelier has steadily gained recognition for an approach rooted in what might be described as an architecture of closeness, one that favours everyday rituals over spectacle, and material intelligence over monumentality. The studio’s work often explores how space is shaped through encounter: informal structures, crafted details, and subtle thresholds that respond to the way people move, pause, and gather.
This human-centred sensibility has positioned LANZA as a rising international voice, with accolades such as the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York and exhibitions spanning from San Francisco to São Paulo. With the Serpentine Pavilion 2026, the practice steps into a global spotlight while maintaining a design language grounded in collective experience.
At the conceptual heart of a serpentine lies an element of English architectural history: the crinkle-crankle wall, also known as a serpentine wall. Defined by its undulating brick form, this type of structure is admired for its efficiency and strength, requiring fewer materials than a straight wall while gaining stability through curvature.
LANZA reinterprets this historical logic not as a nostalgic reference, but as a spatial device, one that both reveals and withholds. The wall becomes a gesture that shapes movement and proximity, guiding visitors through moments of openness and enclosure, encounter and retreat.
The form carries an additional layer of resonance. Echoing the nearby Serpentine Lake, the serpentine line suggests fluidity and continuity, while also recalling the serpent as a protective figure in architectural mythologies across cultures. In this Pavilion, geometry becomes both structural and symbolic, embedding memory into contemporary space.
Materially, the Pavilion will be built primarily from simple clay brick, a choice that connects it directly to its surroundings. Serpentine South itself was originally constructed as a tea pavilion in brick, and LANZA’s proposal establishes a quiet but deliberate dialogue with this context.
Brick columns arranged in rhythmic sequence will support a lightweight, translucent roof, creating an atmosphere defined by permeability rather than closure. Light and air will filter through the structure, blurring distinctions between inside and outside, architecture and landscape. Rather than imposing itself as an object, a serpentine is conceived as an environment: a threshold space where visitors may linger, gather, and experience architecture as a shared condition.
Serpentine describes the Pavilion as a metaphorical bridge between Europe and the Americas, merging English garden traditions with the sensibilities of a contemporary Mexican studio. The commission becomes a meeting of geographies and design cultures, where vernacular construction meets global experimentation, and local history is reimagined through a new architectural voice.
As always, the Pavilion will also serve as a platform for Serpentine’s wider summer programme, hosting performances, talks, screenings, and events that extend its role beyond structure into the realm of cultural exchange.In an anniversary year that looks both backward and forward, a serpentine embodies the Pavilion’s enduring purpose: to offer architecture as an open invitation — a place of lightness, encounter, and ongoing experimentation. Temporary in form, yet lasting in impression, LANZA Atelier’s Pavilion promises to become not just a landmark of the season, but a quietly powerful space of connection.
